DSR with Non-Optimal Route Suppression for MANETs

This paper revisits the issue of route discovery in dynamic source routing (DSR) for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), and puts forward a proposal of a lightweight non-optimal route suppression technique based on the observation of a rarely noted but commonly occurring phenomenon in route discovery. The technique exploits the observed phenomenon to extract query state information that permits intermediate nodes to identify and suppress the initiation of route replies with non-optimal routes, even if the route query is received for the first time. A detailed evaluation of DSR with non-optimal route suppression is found to yield significant improvements in both protocol efficiency and performance.